


Crack

by TheseusInTheMaze



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Disjointing, Dissociation, Dumpster Bagel: Do Not Eat, F/M, Incest, Masturbation, Overstimulation, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 15:13:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20659277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheseusInTheMaze/pseuds/TheseusInTheMaze
Summary: Reginald wants Ben to work on his control with the Horror. Grace offers to help.





	Crack

**Author's Note:**

  * For [listlessness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/listlessness/gifts).

> This one is... odd. There isn't gore, per se, but there is bodily harm.

"Number Six," said Reginald, and Ben tried not to shrink under the withering stare, "you _will_ learn to control your powers!"

"I'm trying," Ben said, and his teeth were gritted, his fists clenched at his sides. He didn't have it in him to be mad at people, which was the irony, wasn't it? He was full of so much roiling hatred and anger, and all of it was aimed _inward_, at the eldritch thing inhabiting his guts. 

"You will spend the remainder of the day practicing," said Reginald, indicating the practice dummies scattered around the training room. "Grace will return in two hours with more dummies, shall you need them."

"But -"

"You will be able to lift up a human being with ripping them asunder!" Reginald said, and Ben stared at his feet, too cowed to argue but refusing to agree. Unfortunately, Reginald took that as an agreement, and just... walked out. It left Ben alone in the room by himself, and he was stuck sitting there, as the Horror writhed and teemed inside of him. It could sense is discomfort, and it wanted _out_.

Ben frowned, squinting at the practice dummies around him, and he concentrated. He would be able to do this. He _needed_ to do this, needed to stop killing people. He wanted to be able to stop a mugger or a bank robber without having to worry about washing blood and guts out of his hair, and he didn't want to even think about how many people he had killed over his life. It was already getting the Academy in legal trouble, although presently Dad was just paying it all off.

Dad couldn't pay it off forever. 

Ben sighed, and he scrubbed his face with his hands. He squinted at one of the practice dummies, and he tried to concentrate. He could do this. He could control it. The monster might not have been him, exactly, but it wasn't _not_ him either. 

He could do this. 

* * *

Ben sat on the floor two hours later, surrounded by the scattered remains of all the practice dummies. His whole body ached from trying to control the Horror, but it was no use. It wouldn't cooperate, no matter what he did. Why did he even bother?

"Ben, darling?" His mother's high heels clicked on the floor as she made her way into the training room, then abruptly went silent as she began to walk on the mats. 

"Hi, Mom," said Ben, and he tried to put on a smile for her. 

"I brought you a sandwich," said Grace. "Your favorite!" Imdeed, she was holding a tray. It had a glass of milk and what looked like a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Much better than one of Five's peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches, but Ben would have preferred to eat a whole cup of sugar like cereal than eat one of those. 

"Thanks, Mom," said Ben, and he gave her a smile that he hoped was sincere. The Horror inside of him was still writhing and wailing inside of him, like a bag full of angry snakes. 

"What seems to be bothering you?" She sat down next to him on the mats, her skirts forming a perfect circle around her. 

He sighed, leaning into her, and she wrapped an arm around his shoulders. "I wish I wasn't like this," he said quietly. 

"Wasn't like what?" She stroked his hair, ruffling it against the grain, then back in place. It was soothing, and he let himself luxuriate in the closeness. He was usually afraid of being any kind of physically intimate with other people - the Horror thirsted for blood like a vampire out of the shitty horror comics he snuck under the covers. 

Grace had no blood. No blood, no heart, no juicy red meat or marrow rich bones to splinter like so much kindling. The Horror saw nothing to eat within her, and that made her safe. 

"I hate my powers," he said, and he was faintly surprised at the vehemence in his own voice. "I wish I was normal. I wish I was ordinary. I wish... I wish I could be like Vanya." He sighed, and took in the scent of her - the powdery makeup on her skin, the warmth of her various moving parts, the faintly artificial notes of her skin. 

"I'm sure Vanya would love to have your powers," Grace said, and her tone was still gentle. "I know how scary it is for you, but I have faith in you."

"Thanks," Ben said, not really paying attention. It was nice to just be close to another human being, even if she wasn't _technically_ human. If he could count as human, with his guts full of monsters, then so could she.

“What seems to be giving you all the trouble in the first place?” Grace stroked Ben’s hair off of his face. 

“The… the Horror, they want things. They want… they want horrible things.” When he pressed his nose into her neck, he could smell the faint trace of whatever she had been cooking: something roasted. He had read about what caused that, the Maillard reaction. Amino acids changing under heat, making delicious things happen. 

"What sorts of horrible things?" She was stroking his face now, and he relaxed further. The Horror was subdued now - there wasn't any blood or meat or bones, as far as it was concerned. 

"I… I don't want to talk about them," Ben murmured. It didn't feel right to talk about… well, all of it. The red tinged desperation that ran through his thoughts like fat marbling through a good steak. Some of it didn’t even seem so bad, at first glance, except it was… well, it was the Horror that wanted it. 

Sometimes, he was afraid that those same red thoughts were actually his own, and the Horror was infecting him. Or maybe he was infecting the Horror, and actually he was the -

"One of the ways to deal with a fear is to confront it," Mom said, interrupting Ben’s spiraling anxiety.

"I... these aren't the sorts of things that I'd talk about with my mother," Ben murmured. How did he even bring up the fact that he wanted to hurt people, except maybe it wasn't him? Or the... the other things.

Ben knew about sexuality, intellectually. He knew that sex was... a thing. A thing that people did with each other, a thing that some people wanted and some people didn't, a thing that he might do some day. But all of his thoughts about sex were tinged with that same redness. It was shameful to admit that he got hard when the Horror ripped someone to shreds, that sometimes when he saw a woman (or a certain kind of man), he wanted to rip them apart, or he wanted to just _take_ them, regardless of whether they wanted it or not, except that wasn't him, that was the Horror. 

... He hoped it was the Horror. 

"I'm a grown woman, sweetheart," Mom said, and her tone was earnest. "I'm also quite hard to scandalize."

"I'm... I'm a bad person," said Ben. His chest was getting tight, and the Horror was getting restless, nudging at the portal of his guts. "I'm not a good person, I'm -"

"Ben," Mom said, and she took his shoulders in her hands, and he looked into her face. He had tears tracking down his face, and when did that happen? "Ben, if you weren't a good person, would you be this upset?" Her tone was so _gentle_, and it made his stomach lurch. He didn't know if it was himself or the Horror at this point; when he was this worked up, everything ended up muddled. 

"If I was a good person I wouldn't have these thoughts in the first place," mumbled Ben.

"Ben," said Grace, and her thumbs were gentle on his cheekbones, collecting his tears, "you are more than your thoughts. I promise. You're yourself, first and foremost." 

"But... I'm my thoughts." He was beginning to chase his tail. Or maybe the Horror was tinging his thoughts - he'd caught it doing that before. 

"You're your thoughts _and_ your actions," said Mom. "You'll be okay. You're doing great so far!"

"Mom, I've killed people," Ben burst out, and now he was crying harder, clutching at her dress.

She wrapped him in her arms and she rocked him, her forehead pressed into his temple. He was sixteen, and he shouldn't have been crying like this, shouldn't have been feeling like this, shouldn't have been doing any of this. He couldn't stop shaking, and he shouldn't have been holding her, should have been pushing her away.

"Sh," Grace said, and she was rocking him, rubbing his back now. Her breasts were pressed against his chest, and he was a bit too distracted by the sensation. She was just so _soft_, so warm, and she was alive, except she wasn't. She didn't bring up the blood lust in him, but good old regular lust seemed to be waking up. 

Hopefully she wouldn't notice that he was starting to get an erection. That would just be the icing on the cake, wouldn't it? 

"Mom," he sniffed, "Mom, I'll... I'll be okay." He leaned back, and she let him sit up, as he wiped his nose. "I'm sorry." 

"Nothing to be sorry about," Grace said, and she smiled at him. Her smile was so sweet. "Do you want to show me your progress?" 

"My... progress?" He picked up his sandwich, took a bite out of it. It tasted like ashes in his mouth, and he was shaking. How could he even be _telling_ her these things? 

"You've been training," she said, indicating several ripped up practice dummies. "Will you show me some of your progress, after you finish your lunch?"

"Well, uh," Ben said, and he licked his lips, "I can, uh... I can at least try." He wasn't too worried about hurting her - _could_ he hurt her? Did she feel pain? 

She kissed him on the temple, and he sighed, and tried to breathe slowly, in and out. He kept his attention on his heartbeat, and he pulled away from her, trying to stay calm. He stepped away, until she was about six feet away from him, and then he turned to one of the still intact practice dummies. 

Okay. 

He let the Horror out slowly, carefully. It was like trying to direct a fire hose through the eye of a sewing needle, and he was already starting to sweat. He directed the tentacles towards the dummy. 

It wasn't alive. The Horror didn't care. He lifted it up clumsily, and flailed it around. If it was an actual person they would have been uncomfortable, but not actually… dead. 

"Very good, Ben!" Mom moved closer, until he could feel the heat of her body against his own. 

His cock was getting hard, and... no, that wasn't right, but he couldn't seem to stop it. He could not get turned on by his mother. That was just wrong. 

_She's a machine_, whispered some dark part of his mind. _She isn't even a real person_. He grimaced, and his cock twitched as he used his tentacles to move the dummy, imagining it was a real person writhing and screaming as he shook it this way and that. 

"How many can you lift at once?" Grace sounded like she was talking about something benign. Something _normal_. He couldn’t put into words how much he appreciated that, even if he felt like a sick freak for getting a boner from his mother. 

"I'm not sure," said Ben. "I've, uh... I can control how many tentacles it is, for the most part, and it's usually about one tentacle per person. Or dummy." He manifested another one, lifted up another dummy. He moved a little too fast this time, and it broke in half. He sighed, as some small part of his mind imagined the snap of the bones and the spray of red. 

The Horror wanted him to drool over that, wanted his cock to get hard. Ben just felt queasy. 

"It's alright," said Grace, and she kissed his forehead. "What do you seem to be stuck on?" 

"They're... they don't move." Ben cleared his throat, manifested another tentacle to pick up another dummy, and his cock was throbbing at him like a broken bone. "I think that's one of the issues."

"Why is that a problem?" Grace had her arm over his shoulder now, and he was _so_ aware of the heat of her, the way she was soft in ways that he couldn't wrap his mind around. 

"I think that one of the things that happens, with people, is that they move in ways that I don't expect, and then the Horror just kind of..." One of the tentacles flexed, and the dummy made a creaking noise.

"I see," said Mom. "Would you like to practice on me?" 

Ben blinked, tried to get his thoughts in order. "Practice on... you?" 

"Certainly," said Mom. "I'm a lot hardier than I look!" 

"I don't want to hurt you," said Ben. "I'd hate for anything to happen to you. I wouldn't want -"

"Your father can repair me, if there's any especially bad damage done," Mom interrupted. "It might do you some good to try on someone moving."

"I'm afraid of hurting you, Mom," said Ben. His heart was beating very loudly in his ears, and he was blushing harder. He set the two dummies down, let his tentacles retreat back into his chest. He wasn't used to being this... horny, when it came to the Horror. Not the kind of horny that felt almost _real_, in a way that he couldn't put his finger on, except that he was filled with some mixture of disgust and longing. 

"You won't hurt me," she assured him.

"What if..." He cleared his throat, tried to find a way to frame it. "I don't want to ruin your clothes," he tried, which was true. 

"I have plenty of clothing," she told him. "Unless you really don't want to?" She frowned, and her expression was so concerned that his heart melted, just a bit.

"No, no, I'd be willing to.. try it," he said, and he took a deep breath. Maybe she was right, and it would do him some good to practice on someone who looked and acted like a person, even if she didn't have blood or meat or any of the other thing that the Horror wanted. "I'll be careful, Mom."

"I trust you, Ben," she said, and she cupped his cheek. 

Ben sighed, took a deep breath, and let his eyes flutter closed. He sent his awareness into his guts, letting the Horror know what he wanted, and it came. It came like the terrifying eldritch abomination it was, and the tentacles were out in the air, waving as if they were seaweed being pushed in a current. He guided them towards Grace, and he was holding on as tightly as he could.

"Very good, Ben," she said, and he opened his eyes. 

The tentacles were wrapped around her ankles and her wrists, and they were tugging her in opposite directions. He was being careful - he was being _so_ careful, holding on with every iota of control that he had. He was shaking, but he would be fine. He would be absolutely _fine_. 

One of the tentacles was moving up Mom's ankle, up her shin. It curled around her calf, and he had the phantom sensation of her calf flexing against him, of the firm warmth of her skin. Another one of the tentacles was moving up her arm, into her sleeve, and he had the mental image of ripping her shirt off, of seeing her breasts in front of his face.

He hadn't ever seen a pair of breasts before - he'd seen a picture in one of Diego's dirty magazines, but a picture was different. But he shouldn't have been thinking that in the first place, not when he was thinking about his _mother_. The Horor seemed to be grasping on to that, because the images that were flooding his head were… 

“Very good, darling,” said Mom, and Ben shook his head to clear it. “You’re being gentle, just like your father asked.” 

_Dad doesn’t want me to be gentle_, thought Ben, as another tentacle manifested, wrapping around Grace’s other leg. _Dad just doesn’t want me to kill anyone else, because it looks bad in the papers_. “Thanks, Mom,” was what Ben said.

“Do you think you can lift me up?” Grace smiled at him, and something in Ben’s stomach leaped. It was like arousal, but it was… moreso, and he shuddered, and tried not to lose control. He was holding on, his jaw clenched and his fingernails digging into his palms. He wasn’t going to hurt her. He wasn’t going to 

_ripfucktearbreak_

hurt her.

“I… I can try,” said Ben, and he took a deep breath, and he lifted her. If he lifted her high enough, he could see up her skirt. The Horror was sliding up her thigh, and no, he couldn’t do that, she was his mother, and besides, you didn’t just _do_ that to people, regardless of what the eldritch being in his head might want. 

It was all going well - he lifted her up, and she was talking to him quietly, although he wasn’t paying much attention to what she was saying. His tentacles were moving across her body, leaving a trail of slime across her dress, but she didn’t seem bothered. He was carefully avoiding her breasts, even as his tentacles grasped at her hips, moved under her arms. He was holding her up and he wasn’t breaking her, he was being so careful, he was going to be okay. He wasn’t a murderer, he wasn’t a monster, he was -

The door opened, and Ben’s concentration was broken. One of the tentacles - the tentacle holding on to Grace’s leg - yanked, and there was a sick _crack_, like when Mom was disjointing a chicken, and now he was thinking about that, and how easy it would be to do it to her. She was a robot, and he could just… no. 

That wasn’t him. That was the Horror. _Had_ to be the Horror, because Ben was a good person, and he didn’t think about that kind of thing, didn’t want to be the kind of person who thought about that sort of thing in the first place. He wasn’t hard in his shorts, he wasn’t thinking about the way that it had been so easy to pull her leg off, he was just lowering her to the ground, and the person who had walked in was Dad. 

Dad was shouting a lot, and Ben was blocking it out, as the tentacles slid back inside of him, and then he was going to Mom, and she was smiling at him. 

“I’m fine, darling,” she said, and she reached out to him. He clung to her, and she made soothing noises, until he was yanked back by his father.

Dad was still talking, but Ben’s ears were ringing. His cock was still hard, and he could remember the _crack_, and he was talking as well, or maybe he was crying? He couldn’t tell right now. The Horror was roiling inside of him, but he forced it down like a bad meal, and tried to clear his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Mom, and she was holding his hand now. He was holding her hand, squeezing it tightly. He could see her underwear, as Dad flipped her skirt up to examine the place where her leg was ripped up. She was wearing peach panties, made of silk or satin or something other than the cotton he had. There was lace edging, and he couldn’t make out anything else, because Dad was barking at him to leave the room and get Pogo, and Ben was stumbling out, his mind still abuzz.

The sound of her leg breaking kept playing in his head, as he found Pogo and babbled out what had happened. Then he was being told to go to his room, and he was mutely going up the stairs. The Horror was still inside of him, beating against the inside of his rib cage, trying to come out of the portal. Maybe it sensed his distress, or maybe it was just riled up from him letting it out in the first place. Dad was going to kill him. What if he’d killed Mom? 

Why was he still so _hard_?

Ben sat on his bed, glaring down at the bulge in his pants, and maybe the Horror sensed his moment of weakness, but the tentacles were inching out of him. They weren’t any living people to rip apart, there weren’t even any people shaped things. He held on to himself with both hands, and the tentacles wriggled under his clothes, slimy and cold against his skin. He was shaking, and there were tears leaking down his face. He let the Horror run the tentacles along his body, let the sensation of touching and being touched fill him up. What if he had killed Mom? What if he had done permanent damage to her?

_Her panties are peach silk._

His cock was getting hard again, and the tentacles were sliding down the waistband of his shorts. It wasn’t the first time they’d done this, but he was just too… tired to do anything but take it right now. He could make it stop, if he had to - it felt like too much effort. He hated to say it, but the cold, slippery sensation of the tentacles sliding along his stomach was… interesting. The _crack_ was echoing through his head, and he clutched at his bedclothes, remembering the way Mom had looked at him with her sweet smile. She wasn’t mad at him - she still loved him. 

He humped up into the close ring of tentacles encircling his cock, and he covered his mouth with one hand to keep from moaning too loudly. A tentacle was probing his asshole, and another one was pressing down gently on the slit of his cock. It was circled around the length of him, and he groaned, panting and moaning. It was… intense, cold and too hot at the same time. His skin was breaking out into waves of goosebumps, and the _crack_ was echoing through his head, and those peach panties, and the way she had smiled. 

He came into his shorts, across the tentacles, soaking into the thin fabric of his boxers, and he was sobbing as the tentacle milked him through it, squeezing more come out of him. There was a tentacle pressing on his balls, and then the tentacle that had been probing him slid all the way in, and he was still being stroked. He was getting soft, but the tentacles didn’t seem to care. The tentacle inside of him was pressing against… something, and his cock was dripping some more, and he was breathing heavily, he was shaking, and the tentacles were _relentless_. 

He let it happen. The pounding of his heart was drowning out the _crack_, and the way his cock was throbbing seemed to take up his whole world. If he didn’t know better, he’d think that the Horror was trying to make it up to him, except it hadn’t ever done that before. He’d thrown up and freaked out and had who knew how many different reactions to shock, and yet here it was, apologizing to him. He might have found it funny, if he wasn’t so lost in it. He had another orgasm, harder than the last one, and he sobbed, more come spurting out of him. The coldness of the tentacle was a sharp contrast to the heat of his body, and then they were withdrawing, and he sobbed as he was left all alone in his room, without even his monsters for company.

He fell asleep, exhausted from crying and anxiety. Tears dried on his face, and his come dried in his shorts. 

* * *

“Ben,” said Mom, and Ben sat bolt upright, blinking over at her. She was walking - she wasn’t even limping. She was wearing a clean dress, and she was… she was okay. She was more than okay - she was smiling, as perfect as ever.

“Mom,” Ben said, and he tried to ignore the dried come on his pubic hair. “Mom, you’re okay…”

“Of course I am, sweetheart,” said Mom, and she kissed him on the forehead. “I told you. I trust you.”

He smiled up at her, and the _crack_ finally went silent in his head.


End file.
